phantasmagorical

“In the England of the 1830’s the insolent luxury of the Regency was juxtaposed with the squalor and misery generated by the new industrialism. It was symptomatic of the times that the “silver fork” novels of the late twenties and thirties - fiction laid in high society and reflecting but seldom deploring its brittle glamor - were succeeded in the forties by novels of social protest, few in number but large in influence, which called overdue attention to the desperate state of the poor in factory and slum. It was at this moment that the young novelist Disraeli, himself a peacock of dandies, coined - or rather, borrowed from the American preacher William Ellery Channing - the two-word phrase which provided a veritable text for all the subsequent Victorian literature of social criticism. In Sybil (1845) one of the characters described the Queen’s nation “the greatest nation that ever existed,” as being in reality “Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws. … THE RICH AND THE POOR.” The gulf was widening year by year, and the search for the means of narrowing it constituted the great challenge of the time.” Richard D. Altick, Victorian People and Ideas: A Companion for the Modern Reader of Victorian Literature, pp. 10-11